A couple moves from the big city to the countryside and starts a small farm...wait, you've heard this premise before? What? Trite? Hackneyed? But, I have goats. Really cute pictures of tiny baby goats. And cheesemaking recipes. We slaughter our own pigs and cure our own bacon! Well, that's in the master plan, anyway. Just read it, you'll see.

"United we bargain, divided we beg."

Sunday, March 28, 2010

- Take a sample of Iris the goat's diarrhea in to the vet for microscopic analysis. She's had serious scours for four or five days now, and she's only eight days out from giving birth to triplets. This is the goat who had a hard time keeping the weight on while she was pregnant - I fed her and fed her but by the end of her pregnancy she was skin and bones nonetheless. She is a star milker - she produces well over a gallon of milk a day and in order to do that, she needs to be in prime condition. If she's losing tons of nutrients and losing hydration due to chronic diarrhea, well, that's just not a sustainable situation. I could concievably lose four goats - Iris and all three triplets. None of the other goats have scours, so I don't know what's going on.

- Fix the washing machine. It's broke again. I swear, I will never again buy a high tech, fancy-schmancy appliance if I can help it. I'm looking for appliances from the seventies - or better yet, the fifties - back when they made things to last. Go ask your grandma how long she's had her blender. If it's less than forty years I'll eat my hat. Even I, who am still under forty years old, had the same washer, dryer, and refrigerator for all fifteen years I lived in my old house in the city. I move up here, decide to buy all new appliances, and they've all broken down - some of them twice. Planned obsolescence. Please, industrial engineers, give it at least five years on a big appliance like a washing machine before it goes kaput. Less than that, and you just erode product loyalty.

- Fences. Oh my god, fences. Fencing is neverending. Never. Ending. The main culprit now is Poppy pony - she has completely mashed down the field fencing between her paddock and the main paddock. The fence is now about two feet high. I don't even know if it's salvageable, or if we just need to cut it out and replace with new fencing. And if we replace it, with what? What I would theoretically like is fences like my sister and brother-in-law have: split rail wooden fences reinforced with field fencing so it works for both horses and goats. However, they have a paddock about fifty by fifty feet: I have over two thousand linear feet of fencing. Homero could do it - in ten years. We could hire it done - for twenty grand. Solution eludes me right now.

- Buy more hay. The grass is growing now, but I don't want my animals to eat it to a nub before it really gets started. One more pick-up load of hay - say, twenty five bales. That ought to bring us into prime grass season. The last hay we bought was total crap. I sent Homero to pick it up, and he knows nothing about how to evaluate hay. It's not his fault. But if I had gone myself, I wouldn't have bought it. It's mostly timothy, stemmy, dry, and not a hint of green in it. We are basically using it for bedding. The hay we bought before that was fabulous hay - alfalfa and orchard grass mix, third cutting, green as grass. The goats tore into it like it was chocolate laced with crack cocaine. I want more of that.

- Garden work. Homero plowed up a gigantic garden and has basically ignored it ever since (a big "I told you so" is choking me right now. Gakh - Hack - Haaawwk- ok I'm fine now). Now we have a thousand square feet of garden space which is rapidly growing grass, clover, burdock, thistles, and blackberries. I have hand-cultivated and planted a few rows here and there - spinach and swiss chard, forty row feet of potatoes, some italian parsley - but the great majority of it is going to waste unless it is either planted or mulched, fast.

Oh there's most likely a lot more, but just writing this much has worn me out.

Not sure if it took my first comment...I was asking if we could come to visit your farm on a "Field Trip Tuesday" (Michelle Bergman, myself, and our two kindergartners). Any Tues except 4/6 would work, and it would be for an hour tops. Anytime between about 11:00 and 3:00...but then I saw the post about the goat with explosive diarrhea, so I'm thinking you've got more to think about than kindergartener visits!